Headline: Writing for Children with Highlights Editor Debra Hess with Tote Giveaway

Anyone who has read to a child or been a kid in the past decade or so has probably read something Debra Hess has written or edited. She is the author of dozens of fiction and nonfiction books for children and has been published by Disney, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and more. She was a series writer on Eureeka’s Castle, editor of Scholastic News and Scholastic Action magazines and the editorial director of the Custom Publishing division of Weekly Reader.

By Sarah Whitney

Among the books she has written are Thurgood Marshall: The Fight for Equal Justice, a NY Public Library Best Books for the Teen Age, and Wilson Sat Alone, an acclaimed picture book that was made into a PBS Storytime Special.

 She joined Highlights for Children as a Senior Editor in June 2009. She is the genre editor for nonfiction, responsible for screening all nonfiction submissions, acquiring nonfiction, and editing all sports, arts, adventure, cultural, lower-level science and social studies, career and profile pieces.

In April, she will speak at the “Write Time! Write Place! Write Now!” conference, sponsored by the Missouri Writers’ Guild. She will present a breakout session entitled, “Why You Should Want to Write For Children’s Magazines.”  Her session will provide an overview of the children’s magazine market and why it is the ultimate stepping stone to becoming a published writer. Debra will also be taking pitches for nonfiction topics for Highlights for Children.

Sarah:  Debra, thank you for taking the time to visit with us about your upcoming presentation at the Missouri Writers’ Guild Annual Conference.

Debra:  I’m looking forward to it.

Sarah:  To begin, could you give us a little more information about your breakout session? Why is writing for the children’s magazine market a good stepping stone for aspiring writers?

Debra:  For one thing, you can begin small.  Once we have purchased anything from a writer—a craft, a poem, an activity—that writer is in our database and on our radar, and we then tend to pay more attention when submissions come through our doors.   There are also hundreds of freelance opportunities for writers in the children’s magazine market.  And, for children’s nonfiction especially, there is less competition than in, say, the adult magazine market or the children’s fiction market.  I’ll address this in depth at the breakout session.

 Sarah:  During the Editors Roundtable at the May 2011 Highlights Foundation workshop, you said Highlights “actively recruits and looks for new authors.” If someone at the conference is interested in finding out more information about how to become a Highlights author, how would you recommend they break the ice?

Debra:  They should attend the breakout session, and if I haven’t answered all of their questions after that, they are welcome to come speak to me.

Sarah:  In the same workshop, you said that the number one mistake people make when they submit nonfiction to Highlights is they don’t realize you guys vet all the pieces for publication through experts. I noticed on the Highlights website, you requested that all nonfiction pieces include a bibliography and an expert review. Could you explain the expert review?  What are you looking for in that? And how would you recommend a writer – new to Highlights – go about getting one?

Debra:  That’s a great question.  If the article is person-specific, say a scientist or a profile of an artist, then the writer would have already interviewed the subject and would simply need to ask for a review of the article before submitting it to Highlights.  If not, foundations, universities and zoos are also great places to find experts.  If an author isn’t certain how to go about it but has done solid research and attached a bibliography, we will sometimes take it upon ourselves to vet an article through an expert prior to purchase.

Sarah:  Highlights receives approximately 800 unsolicited fiction and 200 unsolicited nonfiction submissions each month. In addition to including a bibliography and expert review, what else can writers do to make their submissions stand out from the slush pile?

Debra:  I think most editors get asked this a lot, and the truth is that there is no trick to it.  If the writing is good and the story is a fit for the magazine, then it will garner the attention of an editor. I think it’s important to remember that editors have different tastes and magazines have different needs. Becoming as familiar as possible with the publication and its guidelines is good place to start.

Sarah:  Why is including stories for children about culture so important to Highlights?

Debra:  Highlights is dedicated to helping children be their “best selves.”  We value all children and all walks of life and hope to provide a window into the world for our readers.

Sarah:  In addition to being an editor, you’re also the author of several fiction and nonfiction children’s books. What are a few of the qualities you value in children’s books, and could you cite examples from your own work?

Debra:  I value the same thing as a writer of books as I do as an editor at Highlights.  Good, solid writing, accurate facts, attention to detail and respect for the audience. 

Sarah:  Debra, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope our readers here at the Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference Blog will glean some insight into the submission process at Highlights and will be interested in attending your breakout session during the Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference.

To everyone else, what do you think about this interview? Does anyone who has been published in Highlights have comments to add? Let us know what you think in the comments to win a chance to receive a 2012 Missouri Writers’ Guild tote bag. Tweeting, posting a link on Facebook and blogging about this post gives you extra chances to win. Just tell Tricia when you comment how you helped us spread the word.

In the meantime, if you learned something from any of our conference previews, you should consider registering for the upcoming “Write Time! Write Place! Write Now!” Conference.  By attending, you’ll not only learn from our talented faculty, but you will also have access to two early arrival sessions, individual pitches, and chances to network with faculty and other attendees during our cocktail hour, luncheon, awards banquet and Open Mic.

Early registration ends Dec. 31. That’s less than two weeks away!  Register online via Paypal or print the registration form and submit a check via U.S. mail.

The 2012 Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference is sure to be a great event. I hope to see all of you there.

Keep writing!

www.missouriwritersguild.org

An Interview with Jane Friedman, Former Publisher of Writer’s Digest and Query Critic Giveaway

By Sarah Whitney

Are you a writer baffled by social media?

Curious about the success stories you’ve heard about e-publishing, but wary about releasing your work online?

Or, are you a new writer, still struggling through revisions and rejection letters, frustrated because everyone has different advice about what’s going wrong with your manuscript?

I’m pleased to welcome our next featured conference speaker Jane Friedman. She can provide writers of all experience levels with the insider perspective that will help them make the most of their writing, editing and marketing time between now and the “Write Time! Write Place! Write Now!” Conference.

 

Jane Friedman is an authority on the future of media and publishing. She has spoken at more than 200 events since 2001, including South by Southwest, BookExpo America, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Her expertise has been featured by sources such as NPR’s Morning Edition, Publishers Weekly, GalleyCat, PBS, The Huffington Post, Digital Book World, and Mr. Media, and she was recently called on to serve as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, to review 2011 grants in literature.

Jane has more than a decade of hands-on experience in using new media and technology to engage and grow both online and offline communities, and has been blogging for an audience of creative professionals since 2001. She blogged at Writer’s Digest for three years and now blogs at JaneFriedman.com. Her presence on Twitter (135,000+ followers) is often cited as a model for those seeking to use social media effectively.

Jane now teaches full-time as an e-media and writing professor at the University of Cincinnati, after leaving her post as publisher of Writer’s Digest. She is the author of The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations (April 1, 2011), as well as the Beginning Writer’s Answer Book (Writer’s Digest, 2006).

Jane will teach two break-out sessions and a Sunday Workshop session during the upcoming 2012 Missouri Writers’ Guild conference. Her two breakout sessions are called, “The Impact of Google, Amazon, and Apple on Your Career” and “Evaluating Your First Page for Red Flags.” Her Sunday workshop session is a class on E-publishing. Attendees will learn what services are available to distribute their e-book, if and when they’re endangering the future potential of their work by making it available electronically, 3 essential factors that impact their e-book sales, how to price their work and more.

Sarah:  Jane, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with us today. Writing and publishing can be a tough business, but as long as there are people like you who are willing to share their experiences and insights, then writers who want to put in the work to improve their craft, can hope to someday reach their writing goals.

Jane: Always happy to be of service! Thanks for featuring me.

Sarah: To get us started, you’ve accomplished so much during your career. Can you tell us about your beginning? How did you get into the publishing business?

Jane: Very simple, really. I landed a summer internship at a publishing house while I was still in college. After I graduated, that same publisher hired me full-time. And there I stayed for 12 years!

Sarah: Over the past decade or so, you’ve developed a career as a new media expert. Can you talk about what was your first experience with what’s now called with social media, and what makes you so passionate about it?

Jane: I joined MySpace sometime in 2005 or 2006, and actually found it juvenile and a waste of time. (The functionality and presentation was quite different from today’s social networks.) I didn’t spend much time on MySpace, though I did establish a page there for Writer’s Digest.

In late 2006, I read an article in The New Yorker about a new social network called Facebook that was primarily restricted to college students, but was opening to the general public. I was intrigued and signed up. If you’re my friend on Facebook, you can see the date I uploaded my first Facebook profile photo, December 16, 2006!

At the time, nobody I knew was on Facebook, and I rarely visited the site. Then it took off in my community around 2008-2009.

I had a similar experience with Twitter. I joined early, then became active when it had more widescale adoption.

Why am I passionate about social media? On the most basic level, it’s fun to use. It’s fun to share stuff with other people with whom you have ties, but might not communicate with otherwise. It’s fun to create a persona, too—to play around with how we construct our identities and convey a particular identity to the external world, and to different circles of friends. Endlessly fascinating.

I never started using social media thinking: I’m going to market, promote, and platform build! The very idea would’ve been foreign to me at the time. I was just enjoying myself, and using it to further extend what I already do: serve creative people.

You have to bring something of yourself (of your purpose) to social media tools for them to be effective in your life or career; the tool itself isn’t going to do the work for you. It’s not a magic wand. You bring the magic.

Sarah: You write a monthly post at Write Unboxed. In your September post “A Checklist for Marketing Your E-book,” you observed that sometimes writers seem to default to using social media to market their e-book, and then made the very good point that social media isn’t a marketing strategy, it’s a marketing tool. As you developed the post, you go in-depth about defining market strategies but didn’t say much more about social media. Could you elaborate on about what exactly makes social media – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr – tools and not strategies?

Jane: They’re tools because they’re used in service of a greater purpose that you must determine.

In marketing (and in life!), it’s a well-known principle that you don’t start with the tactics; you start with the objectives.

For instance, an objective might be:

Create awareness that NOVEL X releases on 11/11/11 with the romance community.

Strategy: Spark relevant conversations about the themes of NOVEL X on specific romance Facebook pages.

Tactic: Have a weekly giveaway on XYZ Facebook pages based on responses to specific prompts tied to NOVEL X’s themes.

Let’s look further at the strategy: Build relevant conversations on specific romance Facebook pages. What if our research uncovers that there are no meaningful romance-related Facebook pages or communities? (This is strictly hypothetical.) Then Facebook is the wrong tool to accomplish our objective.

Or, let’s look at the tactic: Have a daily giveaway. What if research or experience tells us that Facebook users who are romance readers hate giveaways? Then we’ve chosen the wrong medium (or tool). Maybe giveaways are better suited to a specific blog instead. (Again, this is all hypothetical.)

To put a more personal perspective on this: What is Jane Friedman’s purpose on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks? To serve creative people by showing them how the industry is changing, and how technology and new media empowers them to find their audience or adapt their work to expand their audience. (And also to have fun.)

Every time I encounter a new tool, I consider how it creates a new opportunity, channel, or expression for that purpose. But it doesn’t make sense for me to use a particular tool if it’s not reaching my audience effectively, if no one is listening, or if I hate using it.

Sarah:  In your E-publishing Master Class, you expect to provide attendees an “unbiased, insider look at the e-book publishing scene” and when writers should do it. Would you give us a sneak peak about when an author might consider publishing an e-book?  Also, are there different considerations for a new writer versus someone who has already published a couple books through a smaller, independent press?

Jane: Independent e-book publishing is a smart option for authors who already have a direct reach to their readership. This reach may have been established through previous traditional publication, or through various elements of a professional platform (media appearances, popular website or blog, public speaking engagements, social media presence, and so on).

If you don’t yet have a direct reach to your audience, then before you jump into the e-publishing game, ask yourself: Can you easily identify your target audience? Do you know where to find them? 

Are you ready to invest the time and energy in answering these questions, then engaging with your audience for many weeks and months?

The interesting thing about e-book releases is that it often works the reverse of traditional publishing book releases. With a traditional publisher, you typically have your greatest sales success in the first 3-12 months of the book’s life. With an e-book, after 3-6 months, you’re probably just getting started. For that reason, it takes persistence. It makes no sense to try e-publishing if you’re not committed to seeing it through for at least 1 year, if not longer. It also tends to be a more effective option if you’re willing to stick with it for multiple books (or if you have multiple titles you can release).

Of course, e-publishing is also a great tool for experimenting, especially since the hard cost to do so is usually zero. Not everything has to be done for profit or gain. You can also play around, or use it as a marketing and promotion vehicle for other things you do.

Sarah: If you could pick one lesson students enrolled in your Intro to E-Media Writing class at the University of Cincinnati should take away from the course once final exams are over, what would it be?

Jane: It’s about showing up and doing the work, on a consistent basis, even if what you’re producing is crap. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. No excuses. There’s no other way to improve, aside from getting the right feedback at the right time from the right person—which is often driven by chance! But that’s yet another reason to do the work consistently—to increase your chances of getting lucky.

Sarah: In your breakout session, “Evaluating Your First Page for Red Flags” you will be giving an insider’s perspective into the beginners’ mistakes that agents and editors look for within a manuscript’s beginning. As a beginning fiction writer, I have found myself obsessing for hours about comma placement, word choice, sentence structure and other details because of this fear. Could you tell me if there are any mistakes that beginning writers are allowed to make without getting their manuscript thrown into the recycle bin?

Jane: Let me allay your fears. Any agent or editor who rejects your work based solely on random surface-level concerns (stray punctuation errors or grammatical snafus), isn’t someone you want to work with. Great writing shines through stray surface-level errors—assuming those errors aren’t so numerous that they become distracting.

To be crystal clear: I’m not talking about the kind of bad grammar and punctuation that immediately reveals a writer who hasn’t even begun to master his craft. I’m talking about people who’ve probably been at work for years, and have the requisite skills to be a writer, but may not be flawless from a mechanical standpoint.

I’m a college writing professor who sees error-ridden work daily—but I can still spot fabulous voice, insightful observations, and provocative point of view through all those errors. Surface errors can be fixed. Boring stories can’t.

I do advocate purposeful wordsmithing and ruthlessness in cutting back flabby prose. But if writers think bad comma placement will result in rejection … well … agents and editors are just trying to scare you because they do receive a lot of crap that should’ve never crossed their desks. Their frustration with all that crap comes out when they admonish you on panels, “Submit only flawless work!” Of course they think they mean it, but they really don’t. They’re reacting to the incredibly bad stuff they receive—and are tired of receiving. I guarantee you they’ve accepted manuscripts that have errors in them. They were willing to overlook them because they kept turning the pages.

Sarah: While researching my questions for your interview, I came across this delightful interview with you about drinking. The last interview question is about why you drink. I would like to add a follow-up question, how does drinking impact your writing?

Jane: I rarely drink when I’m writing for a publication or for my own blog—or for a Q&A like this! On occasion, I may drink to loosen up for more personal types of writing, but even then, I follow these wise words from Ernest Hemingway: “Write drunk; edit sober.”

Sarah: Jane, what has been so great about writing these questions for you, is just how much I’ve learned along the way. Thank you for not only answering my questions here, but everything you’ve contributed to the writing community. I’m looking forward to meeting you this coming April.

For more information about Jane, I recommend checking out her web site www.janefriedman.com and following her on Twitter @Janefriedman. You can also find her monthly over at Writer Unboxed, which is a great writing resource. You can also subscribe to her Electronic Speed newsletter by clicking here.

If you haven’t registered for the “Write Time! Write Place! Write Now! Conference, click here to take advantage of our early registration rates. If you have, thank you and we’re looking forward to seeing you in April. With faculty members like Jane, agents like Ann Behar and authors like Claire Cook, it’s going to be one of our best conferences yet.

In the meantime, please comment below and tell us what you think of Jane’s interview or anything else on your mind. One lucky commenter will win a one-page query letter critic from Jane. Help spread the word through a Facebook post, Tweet or blog post and you’ll earn extra chances to win. Just let Tricia know when you comment. Post your comments by 12/ 13/2011.

EARLY REGISTRATION ENDS DEC. 31, 2011 AND RATES WILL INCREASE.